


The Confessional

by larthrain



Category: Daredevil (TV), The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Author Is Sleep Deprived, F/M, Frank beats up a lot of people actually, Frank gets in fights, In every fan's life comes a time when they must write a high school au for their otp, This is mine, au with more happiness for everybody in general, kastle - Freeform, the blacksmith needs to be punched
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-03
Updated: 2017-07-29
Packaged: 2018-07-28 20:12:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 14,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7655056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/larthrain/pseuds/larthrain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The day after Frank Castle found drugs in the principal’s office, he got into a fight and was summarily expelled from Brooklyn Military Academy.</p><p>Karen Page just wants to keep the school newspaper from falling apart. Unfortunately, she keeps running into a certain transfer student...</p><p>In which Max is adored, Karen pisses off the new kid, and Frank unintentionally looks like he could murder someone, constantly, always, maybe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Appearances

**Author's Note:**

> There comes a time in every fan's life when they must write a high school AU about their OTP. This is my time.

“Remember,” said the teacher to the classroom, “Frank has to learn all of your names and you only have to learn his. Introduce yourself when you talk to him and for once in your lives _be nice_.”

 

Frank Castle grimaced at the back wall of the classroom, hands stuffed into the pockets of his jeans. New school, same bullshit. High school was the shared trauma that united Americans from all walks of life into a united front of apathy and mediocrity.

 

Making friendships during the last half of senior year at a new school was not something that happened to people like Frank and he knew it. Hell, he’d be lucky if anyone told him what the hell was going on in class.

 

This was his own fault.

 

He glared daggers at a drug prevention poster on the back wall of the classroom until he was excused to take a seat.

 

By the time he’d made the torturous walk to his seat at the back of the room, two dozen pairs of eyes watching him the entire time, he didn’t have it in him to be furious. He’d done that in the week before the paperwork for this transfer went through. He sat down with a white flag waving behind his eyes and defeat on the front page of the empty notebook in front of him.

 

He didn’t even know what class this was. He didn’t even care. All he had to do was get through one semester, he thought. His teeth clenched at the thought of the span stretching in front of him in his damn classroom with all these damn kids staring at him.

 

Mr. Owlsley, in his stiff collar and tie, turned the projector on to a slideshow about diminishing marginal utility. Operating on the mindless instinct that had gotten him through countless dull class periods, Frank reached into his pocket for a pencil, and-

 

Came up empty.

 

He checked the spiral of his notebook, then frowned at his backpack. It slumped on the floor next to his desk, devoid of textbooks and practically screaming defeat. A week out of military school and he was already showing up unprepared.

 

Frank licked his lips, shifted in his seat, and leaned towards the kid on his right. “Hey, uh, can I have a pencil?”

 

The kid looked up from his paper and eyed Frank up and down. He looked like he was resisting the urge to flinch. “Uh, sure.”

 

While the kid shuffled through his backpack, Frank double-checked his outfit. He didn’t have any funny stains or anything. Just black jeans and his leather jacket. Maybe the kid thought he was emo. Except Frank didn’t have the hair for that scene.

 

The skull t-shirt might have been over the top. Too much black at one time, or something else that his mom would have cared about. What did he know? Maybe the kid had a thing about combat boots, in which case fuck him and the horse he rode in on, because combat boots were _the shit_.

 

“Here.” The kid handed him a pen and went back to taking notes. His blonde hair was too long and kept falling in his face. Was that normal around here, or was that just Frank’s military school buzzcut talking?

 

Frank looked away from Blondie the moment he realized he was staring and possibly glaring.

 

He had to get through one semester here, and then he would be done with high school forever. Just one semester away from being finished.

 

He could do this.

 

Frank started writing down the notes just in time for Owlsley to change slides.

* * *

 

On Karen Page’s first day at Wilson High School, she had discerned that the hallways were not pathways. They were not streets akin to car traffic. They were not rivers flowing with the student body.

 

The hallways of Wilson High were a divine-right battleground wherein only the worthy and the capable emerged.

 

It took her less than a week to amend her error. Worthiness had nothing to do with it. There were no factors other than sheer animal instinct, the kind that killed baby antelope on cable television. It was the one thing honors students and hallway brawlers had in common. If the world was a kind and just place - well, wishing was pointless. All you could do was adapt.

 

Some students could walk like they owned the hallways, like they were the eye of the hurricane and the battlefield was theirs.

 

Karen Page was not one of them.

 

Karen Page, senior columnist of Wilson High’s student-published newspaper _The Confessional_ (Go Devils!) forced her way through the crowd with a stack of newspapers up to her nose threatening to tumble out of her arms. It was nowhere near as dignified as she would have liked it to be, and nobody got out of her way when they saw her coming, but at leasts she hadn’t caused a scene and dropped any like she had in sophomore year. God, sophomore year.

 

By the time she reached the front of the school, her hands were aching and the papers near the top were doing some worrying things with gravity. It was a narrow thing when she dropped the tower onto a small folding table in front of the double doors. Melvin had done that, probably. Thoughtful Melvin. He deserved better than being a janitor at a school like this.

 

Karen straightened the stack and stepped back, rereading the headline from six feet away like it would make a difference.

 

The headlines were clunky. The subheadings were tacky. The articles were blatantly insincere. It was riddled with typos, because Karen had been home with a fever so bad she could barely stand when it was going through the final stages of revision last week and the other senior in the club wasn’t around to do any editing.

 

Karen had showed up at school on Monday that week to a note from the front office threatening to slash the budget if

 

Even having the on-and-off membership the newspaper club currently had was sheer luck. Even if they rarely showed up and threw together weak articles and never interviewed anybody or covered actual events like football games and graduation rates and district decisions.

 

As it was, the funding for _The Confessional_ had been halved until the student body took a more vested interest.

 

Karen was fully prepared to stab someone if it would give them something to write about.

 

She told Foggy this at lunch and he immediately shook his head. “There’s already enough stabbings,” he explained over a mouthful of shitty school burrito. “If you stab someone for a story it’ll just make the newspaper look like a gossip rag. Which I assume you don’t want it to be.”

 

“I don’t even know what I want,” Karen said. She let herself slump over the table, because she was halfway between desperate to keep a newspaper over a decade old running and done enough to say _screw it_ and get away from the sad, depleted newspaper staff so that she could get some sleep instead of staying up, writing almost every article herself or trying to edit other people’s articles with comments that would make them read less like an obituary or a child’s crayon creation. “Are you sure you don’t want to join newspaper?”

 

“No way, Karen. I love you but I have heard the horror stories, and I don’t need any more harrowing pressure on my performance than I already get from schoolwork and working my parent’s shop.”

 

“You never do your homework and manning a register for a few hours after school isn’t _that_ hard.”

 

“With the smell of blood and meat filling your nostrils?” Foggy gave Karen his best _don’t try me_ look. It almost could have worked if not for that, outside of debate club, and as much as he tried to pretend otherwise, Foggy Nelson had to really work at being an asshole if he wanted to pull it off.

 

“How late were you up playing that lawyer video game last night?” Karen smiled around a strawful of Capri Sun to lessen the sting.

 

Foggy made another, more injured sound. “My digital husband needs me to solve murders, Karen, and I don’t think you’re appreciating the complexity of the situation.”

 

“I really hope we aren’t talking about the lawyer video game again,” Matt said as he took a seat, setting his cane so that it leaned against the table.

 

“We are not discussing this again,” Karen said firmly.

  
Matt raised a speculative eyebrow. “Really, Karen? Because I think we need to. I think that we should take some time every day to talk about the lawyer video game.”

 

“See? Matt gets me.” Foggy nodded like he’d just won the argument. Side by side, shoulders almost touching, with Foggy’s quiet pride matching Matt’s shit-eating grin, they looked like business partners.

 

“No.”

 

“Yes, Karen. Yes. Also, the new kid looks like a serial killer.” Foggy took another thoughtful bite of burrito. “Are you gonna eat that apple, Matt?”

 

Matt tilted his head distantly. “No.”

 

“Wait, what? Go back to the new kid.”

 

Foggy shrugged. “He’s in my economics class. Looked sorta like he didn’t want to be there. Like, most new kids look a little like they’re spooked or startled by everything, but not this guy. He walked in ready to bash skulls together. I give it a week before his first fight.”

 

Karen pulled a ziploc of pretzels from her purse and popped one in her mouth. “Does a transfer student merit a front page headline?”

 

Matt frowned. “I doubt it. But I think I heard about him. His name’s sorta like yours, Foggy.”

 

“Are you suggesting that people have been calling the future serial killer Misty?”

 

A smile flashed across Matt’s face. “Nah, just commenting on the weather.”

 

Karen groaned and dropped her head onto the table. “I missed some important notes in Physics last week and I forgot until now.”

 

“That’s tough, Karen.”

 

“Shut up.” Both Matt and Foggy had taken Physics the year before and forgotten virtually all of it during the summer. In doing so, they had left Karen alone in the class without hope of her friends helping her. “Just because you both have all your science credits…”

 

* * *

 

After a tense meeting of newspaper club, Karen swung by Ms. Gao’s classroom to pick up the physics notes and found that somebody else had borrowed them. Karen’s options for getting the notes before Friday’s quiz were a) ask Grotto, the underclassman with the beginnings of a truly disturbing mustache violating his upper lip, for his notes, or b) hunt down the sorry son of a bitch who had taken those notes and rip the notes from their cold, dead hands.

 

“But who took them?” Karen asked Ms. Gao’s turned back.

 

“New boy.”

 

“Who… The one from Foggy’s class?”

 

Ms. Gao made an uninterested sound.

 

Karen frowned. “Thank you, Ms. Gao.”

 

The hallways were deserted when she left. No way the new kid was still hanging around this late. She didn’t even know what he looked like. Karen made the executive decision to go home.

 

* * *

 

 

A few doors down from the entrance to Karen’s apartment building was an alleyway that Karen normally made a point of staying away from. She’d clipped her backpack on mailboxes trying to stay out of the shadows more than once. Today, however, there was movement that didn’t scream of assault and robbery.

 

The soft click of claws against concrete turned Karen’s attention to the sidewalk, where a soft brown pit bull was trying to disappear into the corner between the wall and a dumpster. Its ears were down, and the tags on the collar around its neck made tinkling sounds when it walked.

 

The collar and its stark ribcage made Karen stop. She looked around. She wasn’t alone on the street, but nobody was watching her. The typical New Yorker could walk past a corpse without batting an eye; a girl approaching a dog wasn’t even worth the time it took to glance.

 

“Doggy?” Karen called tentatively.

 

The dog’s ears perked up immediately. It turned to look at her, and something in its face looked hopeful.

 

Karen was having doubts about getting invested in this dog, but she found it difficult to turn away once she had its attention. It just sat there, looking up at her from the other side of the sidewalk, forlorn and hopeful.

 

“Good boy?” tried Karen.

 

The dog slowly stood up and walked over to her. She watched it carefully the entire time. It didn’t look to be a stray at all. It watched out for other people as it walked, and didn’t so much as brush anyone or anything until it got to Karen. Then it stood, carefully, over her feet, flank pressed to her knees. Karen patted its head and twisted the collar to get a look at the tags, breathing a sigh of relief when the dog didn’t respond with hostility to the contact.

 

MAX, as the dog tags said, had all his shots and was licensed. He looked up at Karen and licked his nose.

 

It took Karen less than ten minutes to smuggle him into her apartment, ducking into closets occasionally to avoid people who would take it upon themselves to remind her that animals were prohibited from the building, and she had no regrets about it whatsoever when she saw him stretched across her couch.

 

She didn’t have any dog food. The apartment where she lived with her brother Kevin and her parents didn’t have a dog bed, or toys, or even a water bowl. Karen filled a tupperware with tap water and put it on the floor in the tiny kitchen and called Max over. He came when called.

 

Karen tied her hair back, turned on the radio, and collapsed on the couch. Max came over and dropped his head in her lap. She scratched him behind his velvety ears while she stared at the ceiling fan and thought long and hard.

 

She reached for her cell phone and texted Foggy.

 

* * *

 

One of the injustices of life is that times of prolonged crisis do not absolve other problems. No matter what dramatic upheaval happens, bills still need to be paid, meals prepared, and homework completed. Especially when you really need the credits, and the teacher doesn’t accept late work, and you don’t know anything in the subject and you are _so behind_.

Frank grimaced at the page as he tried to copy the Physics notes at 7:55 in the morning, one hand gripping the edge of his desk with more tension than was probably necessary while Ms. Gao’s handwriting burned itself into his eyes. Letters and numbers blurred so badly he couldn’t tell whether they were sloppy or if he was the problem. He occasionally took careful sips of black coffee from a thermos on his desk, trying to make it last as long as possible.

He copied several words before realizing that they were numbers. He tried to erase it from his notes, but it was all in ink. He hadn’t even realized he was using a pen.

A flabby white hand tapped the top of Frank’s desk. Frank startled and looked up into the disapproving glare of Mr. Owlsley.

“Drinks are not allowed in this classroom,” said Mr. Owlsley.

Frank leaned back in his seat and, without breaking eye contact, reached for his thermos of black coffee. He drank from it slowly, with the quiet deliberation that Ghandi might have employed when performing a hunger strike if Ghandi was lowkey prepared to commit murder.

“Class begins in less than five minutes,” Mr. Owlsley continued. “Wilson High has a strict policy regarding food and drink, son, and challenging authority will not go uncorrected.”

Two weeks ago, Frank reflected, he was staring down at his own bloodied knuckles while soon-to-be-former classmates fled from him or hunkered to the floor and played dead. Sometimes, if he wasn’t paying attention, the memory of blood in his mouth would remind him why he wasn’t doing drills anymore.

 

Frank shifted back in his seat and unblinkingly stretched out. He had circles under his eyes. His whole body ached. The dull buzz of caffeine behind his eyes was fighting to even remind him why he cared what this flabby dick had to say.

 

Mr. Owlsley was talking again, but Frank missed it. He blinked slowly, for the first time since the teacher had come back for him.

 

Owlsley was still holding eye contact. Frank angled his thermos so he could swallow more.

 

The thermos did not budge from his lips until the moment Owlsley turned and began making his way to the front of the room.

 

Victory.

 

Frank took a moment to watch the retreat, not feeling particularly victorious but still satisfied with his defense of the rightful status quo. Fuck yeah. Damn straight.  

 

The notes were still just as impossible to read.

 

Frank clenched his teeth and kept copying. Somebody else could explain it to him later. Probably. If he could find someone.

 

Ten minutes after the start of class, the blonde kid from yesterday walked in late with a smile on his face.

 

“Nelson-” began Mr. Owlsley when the kid opened the door.

 

“Great to see you too, Mister Owlsley!” chirped the kid. “It sure would be sad if I had to miss a day of this engaging class!”

 

Mr. Owlsley made a deeply discontented expression. “Save it for the theater, Mister Nelson.”

 

The kid, Nelson, sat next to Frank looking pleased. He raised an eyebrow at Frank’s coffee. “I’m surprised the Owl let you get away with that.”

 

“Life is crazy,” Frank responded. He was realizing that defending his right to black coffee that could peel paint had involved drinking most it at once. _That’s life_ , he thought blearily. _That’s just the way that damn world works_.

 

“Man, no offense, but you look wiped. Late night?”

 

“Yeah.” Saying it was a late night still implied that there had been sleeping at some point, but Frank was willing to let it slide. “Didn’t get anything out of it, though.”

 

Nelson considered that. “That sucks.”

 

Frank almost laughed.

 

“Quiet in the back!” Mr. Owlsley called from the front of the room. There weren’t any notes on the projector yet. Frank ignored him. Nelson rolled his eyes and they shared a moment of mutual exasperation.

 

Nelson took out his notebook. Frank went back to Physics notes, trying not to mutter to himself. Muttering was one of his worst habits, and not one that he needed to be unnerving friendly classmates with.

 

“Anyway,” Nelson continued bothering to lower his voice in the slightest, “I wound up helping my friend Karen with her dog yesterday.”

 

Every thought in Frank’s head abruptly ground to a total and complete halt. Whatever the hell it was Frank was writing trailed off. He looked up. “Her dog?” he repeated.

 

Nelson looked up from his notebook, where he’d written the title of today’s lecture. “Yeah, her dog. Why?” He tilted his head. “You like dogs?”

 

Frank’s mouth felt dry. Maybe chugging an entire thermos of coffee at once had burned his tongue. “Uh, sure.”

 

The truth of the matter was that Frank got more excited about dogs than was probably socially acceptable.  He’d been spending his weekends volunteering at the closest pounds since middle school, and half the shelter owners knew him by name. His last girlfriend - his heart physically ached to think about her - used to make fun of him so badly for asking strangers in Central Park if he could pet their dogs. Frank’s own dog was, without a doubt, the most perfect living thing on the face of planet Earth.

 

“Well, Karen’s trying to figure out what kind of food her dog likes,” continued Foggy in complete ignorance of Frank’s fraying mental capabilities.

 

“Right,” Frank croaked with his last lingering vestiges of sanity. He couldn’t do it. Thinking about his ex and his dog and his grades all at once was a no-go.

 

Frank closed the notebook and slid down in his seat until he could stare at the ceiling. Nelson glanced at him periodically throughout the period. Frank ignored it. He counted ceiling tiles until class was done, which was about all that he could handle.

 

* * *

 

Karen got the text halfway through English. She swore under her breath quietly when she read it.

 

“What is it?” whispered Claire next to her. At the front of the classroom, their teacher was reading a poem about someone with self-esteem issues written in the 1800s. The third row couldn’t get away with everything, but they could pull off some things.

 

“The physics notes,” Karen whispered back. “The new kid took them from the science room and I need them. Badly.”

 

“Don’t tell me you’re going to beat him up and take his lunch money,” Claire said, smiling.

 

“No, but I do plan on getting them from him after this period. He sits next to Foggy in economics. Apparently they were talking about dogs today.”

 

“They were talking about dogs in economics?”

“No, just Foggy and the new kid. Foggy’s texting me about it.”

 

“I thought Foggy was scared of this new kid.”

 

Karen shrugged. “He says that winning a tough case always makes him feel more confident.”

 

Claire stopped pretending to listen to the teacher and turned to stare at Karen. “What?”

 

“Ladies, would one of you care to read?” interjected Mr. Ellison.

 

“No!” Claire and Karen said in unison.

 

They waited while Mr. Ellison went back to the poem. It was a _long_ poem about low self-esteem.

 

“Is this one of those things you guys talk about at lunch when I’m volunteering?” Claire eventually hissed. She spent every other lunch period, and the ensuing study hall period she had probably threatened a counsellor to get, at the hospital for volunteer hours and experience.

 

“Um, yeah.” Karen shrugged apologetically.

 

“Ladies!”

 

They ducked their heads and pretended to read, Claire probably puzzling over Foggy’s court sessions and Karen planning her method of attack.

 

In the end, it wasn’t much of an attack at all.

 

It was just her booking it down the hallway, bursting into the economics room with as much force as she could muster against a classroom of teenagers trying to vacate, and locking her eyes on the kid she didn’t recognize pulling himself out of his seat next to Foggy in the very back of the room-

 

Oh.

 

When Karen Page thought ‘new kid,’ her first thought was a nervous boy with skinny jeans and a bad haircut. Even with Foggy’s description the day before, her mental picture had been ‘antisocial, may carry knives.’

 

The kid sitting next to Foggy looked like the kind of guy that worked as a bouncer to support his street fighting habits. If he approached her in a back alley, she would pull out her pepper spray. Vicious, ready to fight in a way that suggested violence was intrinsic to his identity as a person.

 

As Karen watched, he rubbed the palm of his hand into his eye and shrugged his backpack over one shoulder.

 

Karen pushed her way to the front of the room and, toying with her sweater sleeves, blocked the new kid’s (although he didn’t look much like a kid at all) way. He was taller than she had expected. She had to tilt her head back a little bit to look him in the eyes, and what she saw in his eyes made her immediately glance at the floor again. She forced herself to hold eye contact.

 

“You want something?” he said.

 

Karen forced a smile.  “The physics notes, actually. If you have them.”

 

He frowned. “I still need them.”

 

“But you had them all day yesterday, right?”

 

“Stuff came up. I still need the notes.”

 

“Well,” Karen said slowly, “can we share them in the library after school?”

 

Frank shook his head. “No. Still busy.”

 

“Doing what?”Karen was doing her best not to snap, but it was hard because she was also doing her best not to deck him right in the nose. He shifted a little.

 

“Personal stuff.” He didn’t look her in the eye while he said it. “Can you stand aside please, miss?”

 

Karen was caught off guard. She let her eyes bore directly into his skull. Then she stood aside. He pushed past her.

 

Foggy whistled.  “That was terrifying. Are you sure you need those notes?”

 

Karen made a sad sound in the back of her throat as the new kid left the room. He didn’t have to push or weave through the crowd. Others made room for him when they saw him coming. Jesus.

 

“Shut up,” Karen said. She could feel her heart beating in her chest. He could have been worse, some part of her brain knew. He could have been angrier and more aggressive. They could have been screaming at each other in the middle of a half-crowded classroom. But they hadn’t gotten to that point. Something was off. “What’s his name?”

  
“Frank, um, Castle. And,” Foggy offered as the bell rang, “we’re both late for next period.”


	2. A Change of View

Ellison broke the news to her between class periods. This was convenient, because it meant they had minimal privacy and she lacked the time to properly register, process, and react to the information.

 

“You _what_?”

 

Ellison raised his hands defensively. “Don’t murder me, Page. It’s the administration.”

 

Karen glared. Around her, students were shoving to the front of the room and calling to their friends in the hallway.

 

“It’s the budget,” Ellison ventured.

 

Karen relented with a sigh. “I can’t believe this.”

 

“I know,” Ellison said. “I railed against the machine when they told me, but the decision was already made.”

 

Karen huffed a laugh. “You railed? Really?”

 

He shrugged. “Well, I outlined a really strongly worded email, if that’s what counts.”

 

Karen shook her head. “I just… this school has had the newspaper for years. Years. It’s not some pipe dream two kids scrambled together this semester. We have the printers for it, and years of records-”

 

“That was in my email. I’m sorry, Page.” His eyebrows wrinkled over his glasses. Around her own dismay, Karen could see that he looked tired. He’d been sponsoring newspaper longer than she’d been in it, she remembered. This couldn’t be any easier for him to deal with.

 

“Did they respond to your email?”

 

Ellison paused, smiled. “I knew you’d ask that.”

 

“Well?”

 

“They did. With an ultimatum.”

 

Karen raised her eyebrows. “No.”

 

“If you can get twenty people applying for newspaper club next year, they’ll keep the club and restore a full budget.”

 

“Anything less and everything goes.”

 

“Accurate. Here.”

 

“What-”

 

“You’re going to be late for class, Page.”

 

Karen spun to look at the desks behind her. They were mostly full or being filled.

 

“Shit. But- a class only needs fifteen students to let it stay! Why do we need twenty?” she called as she backed through the door.

 

“I am merely a mouthpiece for the horde of bureaucrats!” Ellison called after her. The bell rang.

 

Karen swore again, for luck.

 

* * *

 

Three weeks later found Frank sitting motionless while Mr. Ellison stood three feet away from him and stared him down.

 

Frank let Mr. Ellison speak first.

 

“I asked you to stay after class for a reason, Frank.”

 

“I know.”

 

“I believe that you can be a hard worker and a dedicated student. I really do. And you came to this school late in the year, which. I get that it can be challenging.”

 

“Yessir.”

 

“However. At this point in the year, we are in a tight situation. You need,” and he paused to pursue a paper he held in one hand, “another half credit of English to graduate.”

 

“I know.”

 

“At the rate you are going in my class, you will not be able to graduate. There just isn’t a way for you to realistically do all the work you have missed, and part of that was because you started late but the rest of it is you not doing any homework.”

 

“I know.”

 

“Or classwork.”

 

Frank chose not to respond to that.

 

“Your report cards from your last school suggest that you had no issues with English classes. You have a history of B’s.”

 

Frank knew that. He did most of the homework and wasn’t half bad at multiple choice. He could have been passing the class just fine.

 

He wasn’t.

 

“I don’t provide in-class extra credit. I don’t accept late work, and I don’t make exceptions. However.” Mr. Ellison took special care with his words. It took conscious effort for Frank not to tense. “I am willing to compromise. Because I know that you could otherwise be a good student. Are you willing to compromise?”

 

Frank looked Mr. Ellison in the eye for a long moment. “What’s the deal?”

 

Mr. Ellison leaned in. “Newspaper club.”

 

A doubtful laugh escaped Frank. “What?”

 

“They need people.” Mr. Ellison adjusted his glasses and grabbed his thermos from his desk. “It doesn’t matter if you write an article, arrange the pages, proofread, or even spend three hours stacking paper. I do not care. As long as someone on newspaper tells me you’ve been helpful, I’ll give you enough extra credit to pass this class _if_ and only if you start doing the classwork.”

 

The pounding behind Frank’s head, which had receded an hour ago, returned with a vengeance.

 

“I-”

 

Frank wanted to sleep.

 

“Frank?”

 

“I’ll do it.” His voice came out scratchy. “I’ll join the damn club.”

 

Mr. Ellison didn’t even tell him to watch his language. That’s how pathetic Frank was.

 

* * *

 

“It feels like a morgue in here,” Foggy said, wrinkling his nose.

 

“That’s not true. I’ve been to morgues. They more productive than this.” Claire pointedly stared at a girl sitting by the window who was apparently fixated by a squirrel on windowsill.

 

Matt laughed. “Do I want to ask, Claire?”

 

“I took Anatomy and Physiology last semester,” Claire said with a smile on her face. “Harder than they made it sound, but at least I get bragging rights out of it.”

 

“Oh?” Matt flexed his arm. “What do you call this muscle?”

 

“Showing off,” Claire deadpanned.

 

“Oh, shit,” Foggy whispered. “Get fucking wrecked, Murdock.”

 

“Foggy!” Matt cried in affected surprise. “You wound me. I’m wounded.”

 

“Good thing we have a future nurse here,” Karen said.

 

Claire rolled her eyes. “Telling any of you anything about me was a mistake. I should never have befriended you dorks.”

 

“Too late,” said Matt. “We’ve breathed the same air. We know your name. That’s already half a legally binding contract.”

 

“You sold your soul,” Foggy agreed.

 

“Can you take a look at this and tell me how it reads?” Karen slid a rough draft over to Foggy. He immediately picked it up, scooted his chair closer to Matt, and started reading out loud.

 

“They’re like animals,” Claire said as she watched Foggy dramatically dictate the article to Matt. Matt was delightedly trying not to laugh at Foggy’s elaborate stage diction. “I don’t know how Foggy manages between plays. Sometimes I half expect him to keep showing up for rehearsals after closing night out of habit.”

 

“I think he does,” said Karen. “There’s set deconstruction, and then the theater kids are always hanging out in the auditorium anyway.”

 

“Two weeks until auditions,” Foggy called over without looking away from the article. He returned to reading without pausing.

 

“Then we lose him again,” Karen sighed.

 

“Um, is that the new kid you’ve been talking about?” asked Claire, frowning at the doorway.

 

There, standing just inside the classroom, was Frank Castle. Short hair, black shirt, combat boots, and a look on his face like he was already planning how he would win a fight against everybody in the room.

 

Karen’s first hopeful thought was that someone had given him bad directions. There was no way he was here looking for the newspaper club. He was lost. Please, please let him be lost.

 

His eyes latched onto hers and he started walking towards her.

 

Every molecule of self-control Karen possessed was used in the time it took for him to cross the room to her. It wasn’t that she wanted to run - she felt like she had to scatter some papers and have a pencil in her hand so it would look like she was urgently busy and he was interrupting her.

 

It would have been a hard act. Aside from her friends, there were five other kids in the room and two of them were on their phones. One was vacantly gazing into an open textbook. The last one was he squirrel girl.

 

Then he was standing over her like a brick wall.

 

“I’m joining newspaper,” he said flatly. Karen blinked, then frowned.

 

“What? Why?”

 

He sighed and shifted. Foggy wasn’t reading out loud anymore.

 

“I just gotta, okay? Me and Ellison talked.”

 

“Well, um. It’s a little late in the year.”

 

“I know. But I’m joining. You in charge?”

 

Karen blinked. She forced her fists to unclench. “No. Newspaper runs by seniority in the club.”

 

“Aren’t you the only senior in this room?”

 

A girl in the corner with a Hello Kitty sweatshirt, possibly the shortest senior in the school, gave Frank a dirty look behind his back. Frank didn’t notice.

 

“Yeah,” Karen said, “but I wasn’t in newspaper all of high school. Technically Peter Parker is in charge here.”

 

Frank seemed irritated. “Okay, where’s he at?”

 

“He has an internship at the Daily Bugle. He doesn’t have the time to show up for our newspaper.”

 

Frank looked around the room. “So what am I supposed to do?”

 

Karen looked down at the notebook in front of her. She blanched.

 

“Well,” she ground out through gritted teeth, “printing hasn’t started yet, and we don’t have any stories to work on right now.”

 

Frank looked around the room. Looked at the notebook. Raised an eyebrow.

 

“What about that one?” He nodded at the notebook open on the table in front of Karen. It had ideas scribbled in the margins and questions neatly printed with prominent question marks.

 

“It’s an investigation into the integrity of the school district. We’re not actually going to run it, I couldn’t find anything-”

 

“No.”

 

Karen looked up. “Excuse me?”

 

“I’ll take it.”

 

He stuffed the notebook into his jacket and turned to leave. Karen floundered.

 

“Where are you going!?”

 

He looked back. “To dig up some dirt about corruption in schools, what do you think?”

 

Karen saw red for a brief moment. Her vision cleared in time for him to walk out the door. “I’m coming with you,” she called, grabbing her backpack and racing after him, leaving her friends calling after her.

 

* * *

 

“No fucking way,” Frank repeated.

 

“I can and I will.”

 

“But-”

 

Karen whipped around to face him. Frank was struck by how venomous she was. He’d already had her square him down for those notes he hadn’t studied, but now he seemed to have unwittingly hit a vein.

 

“I can,” Karen hissed like the mythological man-killing terror that she was, “and now I am going to, if only out of spite.”

 

Frank raised his hands in surrender. “Okay, fine. Right. Whatever.”

 

She took another moment to glare at him, then turned to the fence and sized it up.

 

The fence in particular was a chain link number that surrounded Brooklyn Military Academy.

 

“This school looks like a prison,” Karen had mused when Frank pulled his black truck into a parking lot across the street.

 

“‘Cause it was designed by a company that normally makes prison.”

 

Karen had frowned at him. “So all the concrete and big gray walls-”

 

“I know. Now are we going to get inside or not?”

 

The matter of getting inside was complicated. Security on this place was tighter than Wilson High. You had to go through metal detectors and guards to get in. There were cameras everywhere.

 

Looking through the fence at the gray walls, Frank had to admit to himself that this place could have been worse while he’d been there.  He could see the flagpole where someone got stabbed years back. There was the rotting wood of the utility shed that kids used to smoke pot in. It had gone up in flames when someone tried to start a meth lab there and fucked up.

 

The school had changed when Mr. Schoonover became principal.

 

He’d fired most of the staff and replaced them with teachers that were scarier than teenage hormones and all had concealed carry permits. Security guards and metal detectors had been implemented. The budget improved drastically - nobody knew how, but the janitorial staff started giving a shit and the football team got new uniforms. Science textbooks that included Pluto’s temporary fall from planetary status were put in the library.

 

That was three years ago.

 

Four weeks ago-

 

_A flash of guilty surprise in the principal’s eyes and a hushed reprimanding, blood on his knuckles and people at his feet, Maria’s eyes all sad and angry and fierce before she split the sky in two and left him limping in the aftermath-_

 

Frank shuddered. “You going to climb that fence or not?” he asked, half to distract himself and half because Karen was really taking her time. He’d been vocalizing a plan wherein he used his tactical knowledge of Brooklyn Military Academy to sneak in past the security through the front door. Karen had protested that climbing the fence in the back of the school was better for remaining undetected.

 

Doubting her ability to climb a chain link fence, and vocalizing that doubt, was retrospectively an incredibly dumb move on Frank’s part.

 

Well, she was damn thin, and she had on black pumps and a flower skirt. She’d put her hair in a bun when she realized they would be sneaking in, which had made Frank roll his eyes, and now she was insisting that she could climb a fence while not actually climbing it. He couldn’t have been blamed for doubting.

 

Karen took a few steps back. Frank opened his mouth to say something, and-

 

Karen got a running start, leaped almost halfway up the fence, scrambled over the top, and let herself drop on the other side.

 

And it wasn’t like she was the image of grace pulling it off, with her hands white-knuckling the chain link everywhere she touched it and her hair spilling all over her face and shoulders and maybe a frantic edge to the way she climbed like she might retreat if she didn’t do it fast, but _Jesus_.

 

“I don’t know what we’re here for, Frank.”

 

Frank blinked. “Excuse me?”

 

Karen scowled again. “I’m going to need you on this side of the fence if anything’s gonna get done. Hurry up.”

 

And just like that, she started walking towards the school like she hadn’t just turned everything Frank knew about her upside down.

 

Frank almost laughed. He climbed the fence in seconds, partly to keep up and partly because he knew his weight would warp the fence if he took his sweet time.

 

Time was of the essence. They had work to do.

 

* * *

 

 

Watching Frank Castle stalk through the hallways of this prison school hell was an experience in and of itself.

 

Karen had thought that watching Frank argue over notes with her would have shown her how he acted under duress, but she was having second thoughts.

 

In this place with high gray walls and odd prison ceilings, Frank was alert and confident. He walked like a panther hunting its prey. It was all power and danger that knew _exactly_ how dangerous it was. It was a struggle not to watch, not to try and memorize the width of his shoulders and the way his jeans looked when his combat boots walked like he was on his way to murder someone.

 

_I shouldn’t find that attractive_ , Karen thought.

 

It was almost five, and school had been out for a while already. The hallways were empty. Frank led her to the front office of the school, and after glancing through the window to make sure the secretary wasn’t in, Frank edged the door open and slid through.

 

Holding the door very slightly open, he nodded at Karen to follow. Karen blinked back. A frown flashed across his face and he raised his eyes to the top corner of the doorframe, where a bell was poised to ring if the door opened any more.

 

Of course.

 

Karen sidestepped through with less struggle than Frank. There was a moment where they were standing close together, closer than they had before. Frank stepped away. Karen exhaled.

 

Frank went straight for the back of the office and knocked on a door with _Mr. Schoonover_ printed across a white card in official letters.

 

There was no response. He let himself in.

 

Considering how serious and determined Frank had been up to now, Karen was disappointed when the office appeared to be completely normal. There was a normal desk facing the door, with a computer on one side and papers neatly partitioned on the other. A few chairs lined the wall facing the desk. Framed certificates, awards and degrees faced the door. It felt more like trespassing to be alone in this office than when they were climbing the fence to get in.

 

“What are we looking for?” Karen asked.

 

Frank was already rifling through the papers on the desk and opening drawers. “I don’t know,” he said without looking away from his work.

 

“You don’t know?”

 

He glanced up. “No, I know, but I don’t know where to look for it.”

 

“We’re looking for an it.”

Frank grunted. “More like ‘them,” really.”

 

“And they are?”

 

“Drugs.”

 

Karen stopped looking behind picture frames. “Excuse me?”

 

“You’re excused.”

 

She bristled. “Isn’t this a job for the police?”

 

Frank finally stopped. “What, you think I can just call in the cops? Just like that?”

 

“No. I’m not saying that, I just… can’t you call in an anonymous tip at the station? Mention it to a security guard here? There’s got to be at least one guard that could check this out after hours without us breaking and entering.”

 

“That ain’t gonna cut it.” He didn’t elaborate at all, and why would he? He’d barely told her anything at all, not since they hopped in his truck, not before they hopped the fence, not while they were sneaking through the hallways. He just narrowed down to whatever was in front of him and pushed her to the side like she was a little girl tugging on his sleeves and waiting for him to do big important things while she watched. This was all for a damn newspaper article, and here they were trespassing in a school that clearly cared a lot about preventing people from doing shit like trespassing, and he wouldn’t even tell her what was happening.

 

Karen stalked to where he was rummaging through a filing cabinet and slammed it shut. She nearly took his fingers off.

 

“What the fuck!?” he barked, jerking backwards.

 

“Frank Castle, you are going to tell me why we are here and what we are looking for right now or, so help me God, I will fucking strangle you _here and now_.” She was breathing heavily. Frank was staring at her like she was a daisy that had grown teeth and bitten his hand off.

 

She had no regrets.

 

She did, however, have concerns that grew the longer they stood in tense silence. First and foremost was that she had just threatened him despite him having at least twelve inches and a hundred pounds on her.

 

Eventually, Frank spoke. He spoke slowly, as though tasting each word for its bitterness as it left his mouth. “Schoonover… made this school a better place. He changed it, some years back. Everyone loves him. Respects him.” He ran one hand over the side of his face, suddenly looking exhausted. “Fuck, so did I. But three - no, four weeks ago, I walked into his office and saw him handing a ziploc to this other kid, and it had some shady-looking shit in it and I hoped he wasn’t dealing, and-” Frank folded his arms over his chest. “They both jumped, like they were startled and shit, and I guess they were, ‘cause the next day half the football team jumped me outside the locker room after school.”

 

“Wait, you think he sicced the football team on you?”

 

“I know he did. They were talking about it before they came at me. He’s got weight with plenty of local businesses and corporations. Probably offered them jobs.”

 

“So you came to Wilson High to get away from that?”

 

Frank snorted. “Listen, I’m at Wilson High because Schoonover is an asshole and no other reason. It wasn’t my idea to transfer. I got… expelled.”

 

Karen frowned. “They expelled you for getting beat up?”

 

Frank looked a little sheepish. Not at all thrown at the memory of a beatdown. Alarms went off in Karen’s head. “No,” he said carefully. “I, uh, sort of didn’t lose the fight.”

 

At first Karen didn’t get it, and then she had to fight through the disbelief. It was hard to believe, but Frank… didn’t look like he was bragging. If anything, he looked more worried about what she would think. Like wiping the floor with half a football team in an unexpected hallway beatdown was an embarrassing piece of trivia about himself. That he was the kind of person who could get away with that.

 

It occurred to Karen that, perhaps, she ought to be afraid of the boy standing in front of her.

 

Only she wasn’t.

 

Maybe it was just a feeling, a hunch,waiting for evidence to justify or disprove it.She couldn’t put a name to it. Maybe it didn’t even have a name.

 

Maybe it was that, in the backseat of Frank’s truck, there were some crumpled up posters advertising a missing pit bull, and the picture on them was blurry and out of focus but alarmingly close to the dog currently sleeping in Karen’s apartment.

 

“You won a fight against half a football team,” Karen said, just to hear how it sounded when it was her own voice saying it out loud.

 

“ _Won_ is a strong word. I looked like a massive bruise for most of the next week.”

 

“Of course,” said Karen.

 

“But I was the last one standing.”

 

“Right.” Karen took a deep breath. “So Schoonover wanted you gone and without credibility.”

 

Frank nodded. “If I told anyone now, they’d think I was just bitter about getting expelled.”

 

“Christ.” Karen dropped into one of the chairs facing the desk and leaned back. “He was thorough.”

 

“Yeah.” Frank rubbed his neck like he was embarrassed. He didn’t look particularly violent. If anything, he looked like a big clumsy puppy that kept tripping over its paws. She wanted to throw her arms around his shoulders and pull him close.

 

Karen cut off that train of thought before it could go anywhere.

 

“What are we going to do if we find something, anyway? Who’s gonna believe us? If he’s got the security guards here under his thumb-”

 

“I don’t know,” Frank snapped. “You’re the one on the newspaper.”

 

“But I’m not the one that gets to do important shit like this most of the time.”

 

“Why the fuck not?”

 

Karen looked away, face burning. “I wasn’t allowed to join the newspaper until junior year. Seniority, remember?”

 

“So why didn’t you join earlier?”

 

“It’s complicated.” There was a newspaper on Schoonover’s desk. Karen glared at it.

 

“What if we just…” Frank motioned vaguely with his hands, trailing off into frustrated silence. “Maybe we could-”

 

“A school newspaper can’t prove this,” Karen said suddenly.

 

“Huh?”

 

“We can’t write an article that’ll make anything happen, but if we get people involved who actually do this shit for a living then-”

 

Understanding dawned in Frank’s eyes. “But who can we talk to that’ll hear us out?”

 

Karen pulled out her cell phone. “Peter Parker, interning at the Daily Bugle as a photographer. He works closely with a journalist called Ben Urich with a reputation for exposing... problems.”

 

Frank raised an eyebrow. “You follow journalists? Like, the individual writers?”

 

Karen blushed. “I’m really interested in journalism.”

 

Frank had the gall to look amused. She cleared her throat. “We should go back to searching.”

 

“Right.”

 

Several minutes later, she had an idea.

 

“Hey, Frank?”

 

“Yeah?”

 

“Could you pick me up?”

 

“What? Why?”

 

“I want to check the ceiling fan.”

 

“And what is going to be on the ceiling fan? Dust bunnies?”

 

Karen looked him dead in the eye, reached up, and pulled the cord. The blades began to spin.

 

It was a matter of seconds before a small packet flung itself from the ceiling fan and through the open door behind them.

 

Karen beamed. Frank grimaced.

 

That would show him. She was honestly glad she’d been the one to hit gold first. It kept her from feeling useless.

 

She walked out the door to pick it up, knelt to grab it, and-

 

“Hey! Who’re you?”

 

Karen looked up and froze. An old lady with fluffy gray hair and a floral print shirt was glaring at her through thick spectacles. She was also seething mad.

 

“You kids! Stop playing around in Schoonover’s office!”

 

“Shit,” Frank said behind her, and then he rumbled, “Go!” and he was holding her hand and they were sprinting out of the office together, and Frank opened the door by hurling himself at it and they were sprinting across school grounds while the old lady shrieked after them like a harpy.

 

“Who was that!?” Karen yelped as they rounded a corner so fast she almost crashed into a wall. She was wearing heels and a skirt and was most definitely not equipped for this.

 

Frank laughed. “Mrs. Copenhagen. Secretary. She always did hate my guts.”

 

“Castle!” hollered the voice from hallways away. “Don’t think I didn’t see you! Don’t think you’ll get away with this!”

 

At first Karen thought Frank was panting. Then she realized, as she saw the ridiculous smile spreading across his face, that he was laughing, unrepentant.

 

_At least one of us is having fun_ , Karen thought. And then she realized that she had never had to sprint to safety for a news story before. This could be the most sensational story she’d ever been a part of.

 

Karen cheered when they scaled the fence. It seemed like the right thing to do.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. SPECIAL THANKS TO NERDAMONGNERDS for beta'ing a huge chunk of this fic super fast!!! Go check out some of her stuff! Leave her flowers!
> 
> 2\. I'd like to clarify that Foggy's parents are butchers in this au (instead of his dad owning a hardware store) for headcanon reasons that will involve Matt in a later chapter.
> 
> 3\. I know a high school that was built by designers who normally build prisons. It shows.
> 
> 4\. So far 80% of the shipping in this fic is one person doing something and the other person going 'damn' and we're gonna get more shippy in upcoming chapters!


	3. Good For You

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Do I even need to say that I don't own any of the characters in this fic? Aside from Mrs. Copenhagen, and I don't think Marvel particularly wants her.

Karen dropped the bomb during lunch, because she hated Foggy and wanted him to choke to death on his pastrami sandwich. 

 

“The new kid is coming over to my place after school, so I won’t need you to walk Max.” She motioned at Foggy with a baby carrot while she said it. As though anyone else would have the dubious honor of walking the mystery dog while Karen wrote articles and glared at slackers. As though anyone else could be the one whose quality dog walking time was being interrupted for a playdate with the kid who everyone agreed looked like Bad News.

 

Foggy choked when he registered what Karen had said. Matt thumped him on the back while he relearned breathing, which was unnecessary by that point and Matt really didn’t have to put that much muscle behind it. Since when was Matt that strong? It didn’t matter, because the thumping was unnecessary and only affirmed that all of Foggy’s friends and probably Foggy himself were useless.

 

“The new kid?” he asked weakly. “He Who Hails From Military School?”

 

“Frank Castle,” Karen said with more concern for Foggy’s choking than for the fact that she hadn’t explained how she and Frank Castle had gone from Physics notes archrivals to playdate buddies. 

 

“Is this about the article from yesterday?”

 

Karen sighed. She had the decency to be a little ashamed. Good. “It’s complicated. But we’re working on a thing.”

 

There was nothing odd about that except for the fact that Karen had brought it up, unlike every other time she had gone off with someone for an article, meaning that something about this was special. 

 

“Wait,” Karen said. “How did you know Frank got kicked out of military school?”

 

“Kicked out?” Christ. “Brett Mahoney has some friends at Brooklyn Military Academy. He was telling me about it yesterday while his mom bought meat. It’s crazy who you meet when you’re in the butchering business.”

 

“Does being a cashier really qualify as being in the butchering business?” Matt asked.

 

“No,” Karen said. “It doesn’t.”

 

Rude. “I think it does. I certainly smell enough like blood.”

 

“Yeah,” Matt agreed, “you do.” 

 

“You agreed a little quickly there, bud. You want to elaborate on how often I smell like animal blood?” No, wait, Karen had dirt she wasn’t sharing. “Don’t distract me, Matt! Karen, what’s Frank like? How can you work with him? No, what did he say when you invited him over?”

 

“Well, I haven’t asked him over yet.”

 

Foggy nodded invitingly. “Oh. So, you could still… not invite him over.”

 

“No, I’m inviting him over.”   
  


“And what makes you so sure he’s going to agree?”

 

Karen smiled. “He’ll come,” she said. She looked over her shoulder. Foggy followed her eyes to where Frank Castle stood in the corner of the cafeteria, arms folded across his chest while he scanned the crowd. Karen dropped her carrots into her purse and climbed out of her seat. “There he is.”

 

She didn’t even say goodbye. Foggy watched her go.

 

“She just… left,” Foggy said to Matt, trying his best not to feel like a helpless puppy. Matt tilted his head. 

 

“She did that yesterday, too.”

 

“Yeah.” Foggy watched her walk up to Frank. He watched the look on Frank’s face when he saw her. He watched the way Frank immediately started walking towards her, and when they met she put one hand on his elbow and led him out of the cafeteria.

 

“Oh, no,” Foggy said, horror dawning over him like a black sky.

 

“What?” Matt sounded a little panicked, probably because Foggy had latched onto his bicep and was gripping it more and more tightly the longer he watched. 

 

Foggy turned to Matt in horror. “ _ They’re cute _ .”

 

* * *

 

“You better not be full of shit,” Frank commented offhandedly as they climbed the stairs to Karen’s apartment. Karen rolled her eyes, which he couldn’t see from behind her, and when she realized this she reached behind her and swatted him over the head. “Hey. hey, watch the goods. I need those.”

 

“Your brains?” 

 

“My good looks.”

 

Karen laughed. Frank made a wounded sound. “What, you think I’m fucking around? My greatest assets are my biceps and my mug.”

 

“Do you plan on being a kept man, Frank?”

 

He chuckled at that. “Nah, I’m enlisting.”

 

Karen stopped. “Like, the military?”

 

“Yeah.” He looked at her. “Why?”

 

“I can see it,” Karen said. She was aiming for a detached tone and wound up sounding altogether more fond than she wanted to. 

 

Frank raised his eyebrows and smiled. “Yeah?”

 

And maybe it was how close they were together on the stairwell, or maybe it was his smug grin, or maybe the way he looked into her eyes was starting to get a little more fond than Karen was altogether comfortable with, but Karen was suddenly flushed and looked away.

 

“The next level’s where my apartment is,” she said with a carefully even tone.

 

She could feel Frank looking at her. “‘Kay.” He pulled away, she wanted him to step closer, she went up the stairs. This was her life now.

 

She opened the door to her apartment and stepped inside. Frank followed.

 

“So what’s the important thing you wanted me to see?” he asked, eyes flickering over the apartment. 

 

“It’s actually a he,” said Karen. 

 

That’s when the sound started - quiet at first, then growing in urgency. Nails softly clicking on a wooden floor, paws starting to rush-

 

Frank’s breath caught in his throat. Looking sideways at his face, Karen wished she’d been recording. Frank’s curiosity quickly turned to recognition and then a powerful, tentative hope, ready to break itself in a heartbeat. 

 

Max rounded the corner from Karen’s room and bolted straight for them. 

 

“Max,” Frank choked out. Then he took quick steps forward and sank to his knees, where Max crashed into his arms, licked his hands. Frank was repeating Max’s name, laughing and looking over him and giving him ‘good boy’ pets and sounding a little like he was ready to cry. Karen took the opportunity to go into her room and root through her drawers. Watching felt like invading their privacy. Even if it was just a boy and a dog. 

 

When she emerged several minutes later, Frank was sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall, Max rolled on its back in front of him while Frank scratched his belly. His tongue happily lolled out of his mouth. His eyes were closed. He looked blissful.

 

“He’s cute,” Karen said, smiling. 

 

Frank looked up like he’d forgotten he was in her apartment. He was still smiling. “How long have you had him?”

 

“A few weeks. I found him shortly after you started coming to Wilson High.”

 

Frank blinked. “He ran off right before I started going to Wilson High. This whole time-” He shook his head. “How did you know he was mine?”

 

“I saw the posters in the backseat of your car yesterday. The picture was blurry, so I didn’t want to get your hopes up too much by just saying I had your dog. If Max wasn’t yours I would have asked if you wanted him anyway.”

 

Frank turned his head up to meet her eyes with devastating reverence. It made her face hot. She felt like she ought to do something with her hands. She realized that, if he never thanked her for this, it would be okay because the sheer bliss and emotion written all over his face justified everything.

 

“Thank you,” he said, and that was enough.

 

Karen smiled. Max twisted to look at her, pink tongue licking his nose. “Don’t mention it.”

 

They remained like that for a while. Frank and Max, quietly together. Karen leaning against the kitchen counter, watching Frank’s hand scratch Max.

 

“Are your parents home?” Frank eventually asked.

 

“No. They’re at work. They normally don’t get back until at least eight.”

 

“And they’re cool with Max?”

 

“Um.” Karen’s fingers toyed with the hem of her shirt. “They sort of don’t know.”

 

Frank blinked. “What?”

 

“Normally Foggy takes him for long walks after school, while I’m in newspaper. Sometimes he takes Matt with him. I think he uses it as an excuse to not have to go straight to running the register at his parents’ butchery. And once I get back from newspaper, I walk him around for a while, so he’s not bothered spending all night in my room. And my parents leave for work at about six every morning, so I have plenty of time to walk him to the park and back before school.”

 

Frank was starting to get that awed look on his face again. Karen made a point of looking away. “It was fun,” she said, deliberately offhand.

 

“What did you do on weekends?” 

 

“My parents usually go out of town on weekends.”

 

Frank was getting this look on his face, a dawning sort of Karen’s-parents-are-never-around look, a Karen’s-parents-don’t-pay-attention-to-her-look, an I’ve-stumbled-into-an-emotional-minefield-and-the-mental-whiplash-is-gonna-paralyze-me sort of look. 

 

“It’s fine,” Karen said quickly. “They’re not always gone.” That was true. On Christmas and one week in the middle of the summer they came home and slept. 

 

Frank nodded. Karen hated the disbelief in his face. The concern in his eyes, though, was what inspired her to get the show on the road lest they actually have a deep conversation.

 

“We have to get going if we want to catch Peter before he leaves the Bugle offices.”

 

Frank checked the clock. “But school barely just got out.”   
  


“Peter’s a photographer,” Karen said, slinging her purse over her shoulder. “He checks in and leaves immediately. We’ll have to catch him before he’s on his way to a crime scene.”

 

Frank had already taken it upon himself to snag Max’s leash from the kitchen counter and hook it to Max’s collar. Both the collar and the leash were pastel pink. Frank didn’t seem to care.

 

“Right. So, what’s this Peter guy like?”

 

* * *

 

Karen, beautiful golden savior of dogs and dreams alike, insisted that they leave Max in Frank’s truck instead of bringing him in, but she didn’t say anything when Frank kissed Max’s forehead before leaving him so he Frank forgave her.

 

He could tell that she’d been feeding Max well and walking him plenty. She’d even had that Foggy kid walking him after school, and now that Frank thought about it he could remember Foggy talking about dogs a while back. He was such a dumbass not to pick up on that. 

 

Dumbass, dumbass, dumbass.

 

Karen made made Frank’s world turn such a complete 180 in the past days alone that he was still feeling the whiplash as he drove them to the Daily Bugle. 

 

Frank saw Peter at the same time Peter saw Karen. Frank knew that he was Peter because he was the only teenager in the third floor offices of the Daily Bugle and because Peter dropped almost everything he was holding when he almost walked into Karen. 

 

“Peter!” 

 

“Karen!” Peter was too skinny and had a beanie pulled over his particularly fluffy brown hair, which he adjusted while quite obviously looking between the papers covering the floor and Karen, whose laughter was barely suppressed.

 

“You need a hand here?” Karen said despite already having stooped to start picking up papers. Peter nearly fell over in his hurry to help her.

 

“Oh, yeah, sorry! I normally don’t drop things like this but you totally caught me off guard just now. If I’d known you were coming I would have told security.”

 

“Peter!” Karen smacked his arm and Peter laughed. Frank, on his knees with an inch of paperwork in his hands, tried not to look like he was invested in the conversation.

 

“No, no, I kid. Does anyone talk about that still?”

 

Karen snorted. “It’s been old news for a while now. Matt got in a few fights, though.”

 

“Like, Murdock?”

 

“He gets in enough good hits that nobody wants to start anything with him.”

 

Peter whistled. “Neat. I can’t keep up with what’s happening anymore. I feel proud of myself if I can get through a class period without falling asleep.”

 

Karen made a soft ‘oh’ sound. “So the Bugle is keeping you busy?”

 

“Well, yeah. I also have a job at Starbucks.”

 

“He’s in high demand,” said a new voice from a nearby doorway. Peter jumped and flashed a guilty smile at the speaker.   
  


“Mr. Urich!”

 

“Peter,” Mr. Urich said with a soft smile. “I take it these are friends of yours?”

 

“We go to the same school,” Peter explained.

 

“And we have some questions related to... journalism,” Karen interjected pointedly, glancing at Frank. Frank tried to look like someone who belonged in a newspaper club. Peter turned, wide-eyed, to get a good look at Frank through his thick glasses.

 

“Do we have any classes together?” said Peter.

 

Frank considered. “No.”

 

“How about you answer those questions while you take that camera for a walk, Peter.” said Mr. Urich.

 

Peter straightened up. “But Mr. Urich, isn’t Mr. Jameson going to want to talk to you about tomorrow’s article? I have all the paperwork for it-”

 

“Jameson will be easier to handle if he knows you’re out there getting those Spider-Man pictures he loves so dearly. You should clear out before he shows up.” 

 

Peter and Karen looked down the hallway like they expected this Jameson figure to sneak out from between the filing cabinets and spring on them from behind.

 

“Right,” Peter agreed.

 

Karen kept Peter talking about surface-level shit in the elevators and all the way out the front door. Then she grabbed his wrist and pulled him into Frank’s car. She could have been a professional kidnapper.

 

“Holy shit,” Peter said, “that was a cool move. I mean, it would be cooler if you weren’t using it against me, but-”

 

“No, it was still pretty cool,” said Frank, climbing into the driver’s seat. Karen crawled into the passenger’s seat from behind, gripping Frank’s shoulder to keep her balance. He flexed and she snorted. In the back seat, Peter eyed Max warily.

 

“We’re not kidnapping you,” Karen said, “we’re just driving you wherever you need to go while asking you more questions.”

 

“Right. Of course.” Peter straightened his glasses. “Like what?”

 

“How can we prove that the principal of Frank’s old military school is running a drug ring from his office?”

 

Peter laughed. “You’re kidding, right?”

 

Dead silence.

 

“Oh.”

 

“Yeah,” Frank said with a lazy motion to his face. The last impressions of bruises were mostly gone, but Frank had discovered that he had the kind of face that people believed got punched often. “I got banged up when I knew too much. Got kicked out, too.”

 

“Wow. That’s serious. Um, you’d need to have proof. And you’d need to make sure that nobody thought you planted anything, either. You could just leak it, as an anonymous source, or take it to a reporter like Urich and let them look into it on their own.”

 

No. “I don’t trust anyone else. I need to know that Schoonover isn’t going to keep…” Frank’s grip on the steering wheel tightened. “I gotta know this isn’t gonna bite anyone else in the ass. Everyone loves Schoonover, thinking he’s such a great guy, but he sicced the football team on me like a bunch of hitmen.”

 

“I thought that only happened in bad YA novels and internet fiction,” Peter said.

 

Frank scowled. “Me too.”

 

There was a moment of silence. “Whose dog is this?” asked Peter. 

 

“His name’s Max and he’s perfect,” Frank said. 

 

“Ah. Where’d you get him from? He’s really… friendly.”

 

Frank pulled up to a stoplight and glanced into the backseat. Max had draped himself over Peter’s lap and was panting in contentment. 

 

“The kennel. They said he used to be a police dog.”

 

“He didn’t seem like a police dog when I had him,” Karen said. 

 

Frank smiled. “I know. He’s nice to girls.”

 

“Unlike some people.” 

 

Frank turned to Karen in mock horror. “What are- are you trying to say something, Page? Something about me and being nice?”

 

“I’m just saying! Some people! Share notes!”

 

“What, you’re still talking about that shit?” 

 

“I just wanted the notes-”

 

“I was searching, for Max, hours every night-”

 

“And this fucking punk with the only physics notes I can borrow that aren’t from a creep refuses to-”

 

“Creep? What creep? Who’s a creep?”

 

“Not you, this other kid - and even now that notebook just sits in the fucking backseat of your truck-”

 

“This?” Peter said helpfully, holding up the notebook in question.

 

“That!” Karen exclaimed.

 

“That,” Frank groaned. “Oh, God, Karen. You know what? Read it. Read the fucking notebook.”

 

“I don’t mind if I do.”

 

She flipped through the pages in silence.

 

“Well?” said Frank.

 

“What?” Peter asked.

 

“This… is unintelligible,” Karen said in a horrified whisper. 

 

“You see my problem.”

 

“No, Frank, I can’t see your problem, I can’t even begin to read it-”

 

“Shut up-” Frank was laughing, free and light and all kinds of things he hadn’t felt since his expulsion or Maria, and there was a small voice in the back of his mind telling him that maybe, just maybe, this much happiness was dangerous. 

 

It wasn’t until Frank got an eyeful of Karen, giddy and astounded by Mrs. Gao’s handwriting, all happy and glowing in the passenger seat, that it hit him.

 

Frank wasn’t who this was dangerous for.

 

The fact that Frank hadn't been dealing or abusing drugs was irrelevant. Maybe he'd been wrongly accused, but that didn't change the fact that at the end of the day he had a surprising talent for smearing faces across linoleum floors and winning fights through sheer stubbornness. He was a pretty violent person. In the toughest fight of his life he had been outnumbered and unprepared and his victory had still been total and bloody.

 

And Karen didn't deserve that.

 

Karen was too good for that.

 

Frank won fights. Karen saved dogs. Karen Page, with her take-no-shit glare and steeled shoulders and heels that could scale fences, kept Max safe while Frank fruitlessly wandered the darkness of the city searching for something that had already been found. 

 

“Eyes on the road, Frank,” Karen said, not unkindly.

 

Frank smiled and felt a little sick. “Sure thing.”

 

“So. Peter.”

 

“Yes ma’am?”

 

Karen twisted in her seat. “Drug ring. Proof. How.”

 

Peter frowned. “Well, you’d have to have some kind of evidence, and proof that you didn’t plant it. If you walk into a police station with a ziploc of cocaine you’ll get arrested and nobody will believe you. If you take pictures of yourselves holding joints in his office you’ll get arrested and nobody will believe you. If you-”

 

“So that’s how we don’t get it done,” Frank interrupted. “How’s about we talk about doing it?”   
  


Peter shrugged. “There’s not a lot you can do outside of dropping a hint to the police. Unless you have some people that know the principal sent the sports squad after you, your best bet is waiting for something more dramatic to happen that draws attention to it.”

 

Frank frowned, mouth working silently for a moment before the words came. “Like what? What are we gonna let happen? It’s a high school, not a drugstore. Just ‘cause it’s military don’t mean it’s any more the place for a fucking gang war-”

 

“Gangs?” Peter repeated.

 

“I don’t know!” Frank hit the brakes and spun to face Peter. “I don’t know shit about what all Schoonover’s been doing with this business. Where’s the money going? What’s he getting from it? How’d he start? Fuck if I know! What do I know? I got kicked out without a hearing. Everybody there washed their hands of me.”

 

“Frank.”

 

“I ain’t heard shit from anyone, you got that? Nothing. Fucking radio silence. I mighta had a girl and some people I thought were friends and now I’m ending high school with a bunch of fucking strangers that don’t care about any of that shit.”

 

“Frank.”

 

“But he sent people after me and I’ve got to live knowing that he’d do stuff like that and he’s going to keep doing it next time someone walks in on a trade.”

 

“Frank.”

 

“What?” he snapped, and-

 

Those blue eyes looking right at him, looking right through him, tearing open something inside of him and for a moment he almost felt bad for losing his temper at this fucking Parker kid-

 

“We’re stopped in the middle of the road.”

 

Frank blinked. “Shit.”

 

“Yeah.” Karen leaned back in her seat and exhaled slowly. “That’s- yeah.”

 

He pulled over on autopilot, mind reeling with everything he’d just said. He was already cringing at the thought of all that self-deprecating bullshit that had come out of his mouth. God, he’d said all that. Out loud. To Karen. In front of the squirrelly kid in the backseat.

 

At least Max wouldn’t judge him.

 

“We’re going to do something, Frank.”

 

He looked out the window. “I know.”   
  


“No,” she shook her head. “I mean, right now we’re going to do something.”

 

Frank frowned. “Like what?”

 

Karen shook her head and pointed down the street. “Just drive,” she said. “Take the first turn to the left.”

 

Peter spoke up from the back seat. “I’m not getting dropped off anywhere, am I.”

 

“Nope.”

 

* * *

 

Peter held his breath when Frank and Karen pulled him into Schoonover’s office and closed the door. Max, happily trotting after them, took the moment to lick Peter’s kneecap through a hole in his jeans.

 

“I’m pretty sure this is kind of illegal,” Peter said softly. 

 

Karen didn’t bother to lower her voice. She was pretty sure the walls here were thin enough that her normal volume wouldn’t carry. “So’s Schoonover.”

 

“Sure,” Peter said, “but also, like, you guys don’t run the risk of getting fired if you get caught.”

 

Karen shot a look to Frank, who was jiggling locked drawers and removing the paper clips from all the documents he could find. “Or you could be a certifiable witness that the papers will trust with this story.”

 

“I’m an intern. I’m not even getting paid, it’s not like I’m some valuable commodity-”

 

Karen turned on the ceiling fan and tilted her head back to watch it spin. “So what are those Spider-Man pictures nobody else seems to be able to get?”

 

She felt Peter shrug. “I’m just saying. We can’t count on them trusting my word. They could think we planted something, or that we’re all a bunch of Bad Kids who do drugs and, y’know, we’re trying to steal stuff so we could sell it and buy more drugs.”

 

Karen gave up on the ceiling fan. “We’re just looking right now. We don’t even know if we’ll find anything. We don’t even know whether there’s anything to find.”

 

The fan was clean. Half the drawers in the desk were locked and the ones that weren’t were depressingly free of criminal activity. There wasn’t even a hint of felony on the documents they could skim.

 

Frank was holding himself differently the longer they searched. His eyes were looking more and more removed, and his shoulders were falling into a resigned slump. The absence of justice, the fall of his reputation-

 

“Frank?”

 

“Hm?”

 

“Who’s Maria?”

 

Frank froze, looking at her. Peter glanced up, cleared his throat, and conspicuously went back to flipping through files for small ziploc baggies.

 

Max found a pen on the floor and started chewing.

 

“She used to be somebody,” Frank said. “But now she’s nobody. She didn’t like the idea of dating someone with a violent track record, and-”

 

The door swung open with a bang. Framed in the doorway was a heavyset old woman, floral prints garish against the dark blue and black of the security officers flanking Mrs. Copenhagen.

 

“I knew I saw someone sneaking in again!"

 

Karen straightened and backed up against the wall. Frank squared his shoulders. Peter dropped the file he was holding. Papers went everywhere.

 

“Shit,” Frank said, succinctly. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed the surprise Foggy POV.


	4. Max's Moment

First there was yelling, then some phone calls were made, and then there was more yelling while Max made unhappy growling sounds and Frank essentially solidified into a solid block of granite. He was functionally mute by the time the police arrived.

 

Which left the talking to Karen.

 

Making excuses was harder with a man like Schoonover staring her down. The guy had the wrinkles and white hair of a grandfather, but when he smiled there was iron in his eyes and it frightened Karen more than she had ever realized.

 

“We were trying to find the bathroom,” Karen said. “We got lost.”

 

“You don’t honestly expect me to believe that.”

 

“I don’t honestly expect a lot of things from the school system and I don’t receive a lot either.”

 

Peter made a quiet, desperate sound that could have been a laugh.

 

“And you,” Schoonover said, nodding at Peter. He hadn’t even bothered to sit. He just stood behind his desk, tall, menacing, old.

 

“Me,” repeated Peter. Karen shot him a look. He caught her eye and made a face like he was trying to communicate his last will and testament.

 

“These two seem to have persuaded you to join them,” Schoonover said. He folded his arms behind his back. “Mrs. Copenhagen reports that these two were alone the first time they broke in.” He leaned over his desk. “Now, what could have persuaded a rational young man such as yourself to tag along on their little adventures?”

 

Karen shot Peter a look that said that if he so much as thought ‘journalistic curiosity’ she would hunt him down and leave his body in a dumpster.

 

“Oh, you know…” Peter trailed off.

 

Schoonover raised an eyebrow. “No, I don’t.”

 

“The usual.” Peter laughed weakly.

 

Schoonover sighed. “I suppose I don’t have to say how disappointed I am in all of you. Especially you, Frank.” He tsk’d. “I always thought you showed potential, son. But since you got expelled I guess you let it eat away at you. Thought you’d come back and, what-” He stepped back and swept his arms out, motioning to the office around him. “Burn down my office?”

 

Karen frowned. “What? No-”

 

“Oh, yes,” Schoonover said grandly. “I rather fear you did. You see, you were even caught with this lighter. It’s hard to dispute evidence.” He dropped a fluorescent green Zippo onto his desk.

 

“You son of a bitch,” Karen said flatly.

 

“The less you say the better,” Schoonover replied, equally monotone.

 

“Fuck you,” said Karen.

 

Max growled from where he was sprawled between Karen and Frank’s chair.

 

“Can you make the dog be quiet?” Schoonover asked.

 

“No.”

 

“Of course.”

 

Two sharp knocks at the door announced Mrs. Copenhagen leaning in with a conspiratorial smile on her face. “The police are here!” she chirped. Satisfied. Karen took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

 

“Karen?”

 

Karen spun around in her seat. “Mr. Mahoney?”

 

Brett Mahoney and Karen often studied for Precalculus tests together at the Mahoney’s kitchen table. She’d only seen his dad once or twice, usually when he came home exhausted at the end of his shift. He was friendly in a sincere way, even though he was so clearly tired, and now he was going to forever associate Karen with breaking into school, the least impressive of all crimes. Great. Even though she wasn’t close to him, losing his approval made her heart sink. Maybe she could blame it on her own absent parents.

 

“What seems to be the problem here?”

 

Schoonover smiled and it didn’t reach his eyes. “Breaking and entering, officer.”

 

“Don’t believe him, Mister Mahoney, he’s got no proof.”

 

“That’s not quite true.” Schoonover held up the lighter. “This little guy here says otherwise.”

 

Mahoney smiled. It wasn’t the friendly smile he gave Karen when she was sitting next to Ben and hovering over polynomials. “That won’t be necessary, sir. I’d like you two kids,” he said to the culprits, “to sit for a minute, and I’ll take all your statements separately.”

 

“Fantastic,” Peter said. He sounded minutes away from joining Frank’s blue screen of death.

  
Max growled again.

 

“Can’t you quiet that thing?”

 

“Nope.”

 

“Peter,” Mahoney interjected, I’ll interview you first, okay?”

 

Peter nodded stiffly and rose from his seat. The door, closed behind him, suddenly creaked open and a security guard poked his head in.

 

“Dr. Schoonover?” said the security guard, before blinking in surprise at the scene before him: three kids, an officer, and a dog, all staring back at him.

 

Then, without further ado, Max proved beyond a doubt that he had spent the majority of his life before Frank and Karen as a police dog.

 

* * *

 

It only took seconds for Mahoney to realize that Max, standing and growling, was exhibiting classical symptoms of police training, and from there everything fell on the nervous, sweating security guard who couldn’t lie to save his life, and quite suddenly the handcuffs were out and Mahoney was reading Schoonover and the panicked security guard his Miranda rights while ushering both men into the back of a police car.

 

Frank and Karen had been ordered to sit in the hallway and await further instruction, and Frank still seemed to be short circuiting. He sunk against the wall until his legs were stretched in front of him, hands loosely clasping each other in his lap.

 

Peter looked up and down the hallway, bouncing on his heels.

 

“Do we really have to sit, like, right here? I mean, here? Is it important that we stay here-”

 

Karen found a dollar in her pocket. “Go find a vending machine and get yourself something.”

 

Peter frowned. “Really?”  


“Yeah.” She smiled. “Consider it an apology for getting you a police record.”

 

She sat down next to Frank and listened to Peter’s receding footsteps.

 

“...I thought it was over,” Frank said quietly. Softer than anything she had ever heard him say.

 

“What?”

 

“I thought we were done. I thought… they’d find something worse than getting expelled and my name dragged through the shit, and they’d stick it to us, and fuck everything up, and Schoonover’d get away with everything and that would be it. I really thought that would be it. That was almost it.”

 

“Almost. Not quite.” Karen leaned so her shoulder nudged Frank’s. Both of them kept their eyes fixed on the opposite wall.

 

“And you were still fighting.”

 

“Huh?”

 

“It was all over, and you were still kicking.” Frank laughed a little. “Like, you weren’t letting him off easy. You were going down fighting like you couldn’t let go of anything to save your life.”

 

Karen thought about that. She didn’t feel tough, particularly. More prepared to duke it out than she had been before, when she’d mostly had anxieties about deadlines and the future, before she’d almost risked that future.

 

“You deserve better.” She said it quietly, so differently than she’d said everything that got tossed at Schoonover. This was a gentler voice, more care and compassion and respect in every syllable.

 

Frank was silent.

 

“You- you’ve been struggling with this all this time, and you don’t have anybody else trying to help you through it. And then you get put on the newspaper club, which I know you weren’t excited about, and you rolled with it and wound up in over your head again and all this time you’ve been worried sick over Max and stressed about homework. And having this new environment and everything happening without any friends around.”

 

“I do too have friends.”

 

A pause. “That’s what you got from all this?”

 

“No. I do have friends though.”

 

“Name them.”

 

“Claire.”  


Karen turned. “Claire Temple? You know her?”  


“I know her.”

 

Karen frowned. “Have you had any conversations with her longer than five minutes?”

 

Frank shrugged lazily. “We spoke once when I was trying to find you.”

 

Karen shuffled closer to elbow him, laughing. “That’s not a friendship, Frank!”

 

“Aw shit. I borrowed a pencil from Foggy once.”

 

“What a heartwarming moment.”

 

“It was my first day. It was fucking _touching_.”

 

“Really though, Frank. You didn’t deserve what Schoonover did. And he deserves everything that he’s got coming to him.”

 

She wasn’t sure what she was expecting when she turned to look at Frank. Buzz cut. Slow smile, if she was lucky.

 

What she got was something that she knew, for a fact, she’d remember for the rest of her life.

 

Her first impression of him had never been more wrong than in this moment - he was looking at her like he’d never seen more beautiful thing in his life. He was looking at her like he was trying to say volumes with just his eyes, and he’d never looked less inexpressive in his life. He looked like he could melt. He looked like how she felt.

 

He was saying volumes with his eyes, in fact. He was saying them very clearly, and with all the respect and admiration and fondness in the world, and Karen very much wanted to return them.

 

Which is why, when Peter returned with a bag of peanut M&Ms in one hand and a Snickers in the other, he startled for a few seconds and then, very quietly, left the two to their kiss.

 

* * *

 

“I can’t believe you two are vigilantes,” Matt said later.

 

“We’re not vigilantes,” said Karen.

 

“Yeah. But, like. You stopped a drug ring.”

 

“Getting a principal arrested doesn't mean we're vigilantes. Max honestly did more of the work than us.”

 

“It’s close enough, though.”

 

They were walking the hallways between classes. The hallways seemed brighter now that they were weeks from graduation. The BO smelled sweeter, or maybe that was just the weather warming up, or the fruit rotting in someone’s locker.

 

“To be honest,” Karen said, “I initially had my doubts about Frank.”

 

“I would never have guessed.” Sarcasm.

 

“No. Really. And then, during everything, it all seemed to come together and I realized - he was the one.”

 

Matt laughed. “Can I tell you a secret?”  


“Only if I get to print it in the paper.”

 

“The final edition’s already finalized and getting printed you liar. I see through you.”

 

Matt was able to hold his straight face for almost five whole seconds.

 

“Here’s the secret,” Matt said once they’d both stopped laughing. Karen blinked at him.

 

“What?”  
  
“I didn’t want to be friends with Foggy when I first met him. Like, I really didn’t want to even be near him. We were assigned to work together on a project and I thought I was going to die.”

 

Karen struggled to wrap her mind around this. Matt and Foggy were inseparable. They were the peanut butter and jelly of her life, the essential pair that she simply could not imagine breaking apart. “What the hell?”

 

“He’s always working with his uncle. The butcher.”

 

“So?”  


“Well.” Matt fidgeted, uncomfortably. “I thought he smelled like blood. And raw meat. A lot. And before I knew why, it just really freaked me out. Imagine being in sixth grade and someone who’s really nice to you always smells like blood. Wouldn’t that freak you out? A little bit?”

 

“Are you… a vampire?”  


Matt laughed. “Karen! I’m opening up to you! Emotionally!”

 

Karen elbowed him. “Sure you are. But, like. Really? I can’t imagine you and Foggy being anything other than besties for life.”

 

Matt fidgeted just a little. “Um, yeah. Most of the fights we’ve had have been my fault. And I’m pretty sure he knows I wasn’t wild about him at first.”

 

“And here we are,” Karen said.

 

“Together,” added Matt.

 

“Late for class.”

 

“Shit.”

 

Matt was late for English. Karen was late for Chemistry. Or rather, she was absent from Chemistry, because she was instead sitting in the back of Frank’s truck with him, hands clasped between the two of them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR READING! I appreciate all you readers like you would not believe (even if I show my love by vanishing for months) and if you've been here since the first chapter thank you so so much for sticking around. It's been a pleasure to write for the DD fandom.
> 
> PS Peter went on to write a fantastic article on the arrest that got him a paying job at the Daily Bugle and Benjamin Urich lives forever, Max is given many treats, and everything is sunshine forever.

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. Ms. Gao is the Physics teacher because she also teaches Chemistry in this au, because in canon... drugs. She is very ready to retire.
> 
> 2\. There's going to be way more Kastle coming up, now that they've met.
> 
> 3\. There isn't very much Matt because anything with Matt demands to become its own separate fic. 
> 
> 4\. Brooklyn Military Academy is not a real school that I am aware of, and it's not supposed to be (in this fic) a fancy place at all.
> 
> 5\. I've already got more of this written - I won't take more than a month to update!
> 
> 6\. Thank you so much for reading!!


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